Kimi Raikkonen communicates

Very briefly, via his manager Steve Robertson, for exactly one sentence, four paragraphs into this story here.

At all of its many levels, NASCAR is a sport which strongly encourages drivers to build up some kind of personality for the fans to love unconditionally (see Dale Earnhardt Jr) or roundly despise (cough Kyle Busch cough), while remembering to namecheck all 327 of your sponsors on any given weekend and treat every interview as a PR opportunity.  Kimi Raikkonen likes driving cars, dislikes any kind of fan interaction or media activity and spends much of his free time holidaying in the small Norwegian village of Unintelligibuhl.

To call Kimi Raikkonen and the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series unlikely bedfellows is akin to calling the Cuban Missile Crisis a slight falling-out.  He’s not a massive box office draw these days, has no appetite for racing’s corporate side and has no previous oval racing experience.  His second year in the World Rally Championship is so far proving to be no better than his first, though, and the opportunity to briefly try a new way of travelling very quickly is surely difficult to resist for a man who has always had great awareness of the world outside of Formula 1.  Don’t be too surprised that Kimi’s giving NASCAR a quick whirl, joining friend of petrolheadblog.com Nelson Piquet Jr in the truck series.  Be incredibly surprised if he stays there for any great length of time.

Answering an age-old question

Just how many racing drivers can you fit onto a moving Formula 1 car?

This one from the archives shows the slowing down lap at the end of the 1986 Mexican Grand Prix.  Rene Arnoux and Stefan Johansson are the two gentlemen sat on Philippe Alliot’s Ligier, with Nelson Piquet riding to the rescue in his Williams when Alliot’s car decides its life’s work has already been completed.

Keen followers of this blog, particularly those who were around to witness its original incarnation, might like to note that even fully laden, Nelson’s still going at a higher speed than his son used to manage.

Reunited and it feels so good

Regular visitors to the old place will recall a fondness for friend of petrolheadblog.com Nelson Piquet Jr, whose inability to drive quickly, complete a race distance without crashing or keep his thoughts to himself made him a firm favourite among habitually facetious bloggers with a taste for the absurd.

During the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, Nelsinho crashed deliberately in order to cause a disruption to the race which influenced the result in favour of his Renault team mate Fernando Alonso.  Wikipedia has a decent summary for the uninitiated. In the middle of 2009, shortly after Renault fired him, our hero admitted this to the Brazilian media and sparked an investigation which confirmed he acted under orders, desperate to keep his place in F1.  Those responsible were fired and banned from the sport, while Nelson emerged with no credit and no job since his intentional crash in Singapore was a) just one of seventeen separate crashes in a career spanning twenty-eight races and b) incredibly badly executed, especially for a man with so much first-hand experience of what an accident should look like.  A harmless spin and a stalled engine would have been just fine, but instead…:

All told, the Brazilian hasn’t had a sparkling couple of years.  How appropriate, then, that on the day I start blogging again, my best borderline incompetent pal should get some good news at last: he and his Dad have won a libel case against the Renault F1 team, who’d previously suggested that the whole crashing on purpose business was the product of two very active South American imaginations.

We still remember you, mate…